Blog, Resurrected.

Wednesday April 3rd 2013

Let me start this out by acknowledging that the only visitors to this blog are my friends and the occasional Chinese spam bot, AND that I also realize that no one noticed or cared (or at least didn't comment) about the lack of action here on the blog or the fact that it completely disappeared when I updated the website.

Oh yeah, did I mention that I updated the website? Because I did -- not a complete re-write, as the Drupal backend didn't really change, but every page and style was re-worked. It took forever because, you know, work and life and all, and it definitely needs some work and ended up half-assed, but what else is new?

Anyway, when I updated the site, I killed the redirect to the blog, because I hadn't updated it in more than a year and had nothing to say. That changed today when I decided that there was still a reason to rant about things, and because I have been furiously making new games and porting old ones over to Javascript and HTML5. For a long time I had this wonderfully misguided idea that one day I would release some amazing game that would allow me to retire early and that people would enjoy and speak about in hushed tones. Reality is a harsh mistress however, and I have come to realize that a) I don't have the resources nor can spend the time to actually develop something that isn't totally half-assed, b) my ideas are either too weird or partially-formed and require more time and planning than I spend on them, and c) the game industry is really shitty to developers. My friends in the industry tell tales of long hours, horrible deadlines and a whole raft of complaints for similar (and in some cases less) money than what I am making working in an entirely different code mine in a different industry. I'm convinced that the recent popularity of indie games is at least partially due to the studio system being ill-equipped to promote creativity outside of rigid, formulaic, marketing-heavy concepts and reluctant to pay what the rest of the development world does because everyone wants to work in video games.

Point is that I've been trying to build out smaller, more portable, hopefully more interesting projects and eventually open source them, instead of focusing on single, ever-expanding, too-complicated-for-one-guy projects that never got finished. A quick look down my past blog entries illustrates this perfectly -- I was able to port Lobster Petting multiple times to multiple different systems because it is the simplest mechanic available (hence why the new website's Software page has a lobster to pet in the background), but my hard drive is littered with half-finished projects of uncertain complexity. There are adventure games built in engines that no longer work on my computer (PPC only), a 3D Atomic Combat that is really just cubes following a poorly-written movement script, a game that I have sounds for but no graphics or code, a gallery of what seem to be 8-bit sleazeballs, and enough unfinished games to build a small (but shitty) studio around.

So I resurrected the blog so I can maybe show off some of these projects in the future. And maybe because I wanted someplace to occasionally rant on about game ideas I had or weird things I'm working on that will never be finished.